Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Opabinia regalis/Statement

Opabinia regalis

Well, this is about the last thing I ever thought I'd do here.

My qualifications for the job consist almost entirely of being a level-headed, deliberative, analytical person who is usually pretty good at connecting to the human beings behind the pixels on the screen (despite being an extinct invertebrate). I'm an admin, though not of terribly long standing (ahem, I'll spin this as "unique perspective"). I have no other special permissions and am not important in any other way. I work on articles about biochemistry and think of myself as primarily content-focused (though that damn pie chart has been making a liar out of me lately). My day job is scientific research, and I think the habits of mind that come from digging through a mountain of complex and inconsistent evidence in order to parse out reasonable conclusions are fairly transferable skills. I'm part of this project because I believe in the mission of providing widely accessible, freely licensed content to the public; if I have a "platform" here, it is to center arbcom's activities on supporting that mission.

I'm also a woman in a predominantly male STEM field. The topic of Wikipedia's "gender gap" has been very fraught lately and is full of heated rhetoric on all sides. In a related but distinct development, the problem of harassment of Wikipedia volunteers has become a major issue recently. I think we could really benefit from hearing more women's voices on the committee regarding these issues.

I'm putting my name in now because a) we don't yet have any female candidates, and I hope more will join me; and b) I'd like to start taking questions this weekend. As a note, I'm traveling for Thanksgiving and then again for a long-planned work event the first week of December. On that topic, all else being equal, I think it's good for positions of wiki-responsibility to include people with diverse off-wiki lives and obligations, and it's important that arbcom tasks be structured to make effective use of available volunteer time. Where work can be given back to the community, we all win: perceived power is decentralized, decisions can be made more transparently, and arbcom can concentrate on its core functions.

Mandatory stuff:

• I meet the criteria for access to non-public data and am willing to sign the confidentiality agreement.
• I have two alternate accounts: a non-admin account Opabinia externa that I occasionally use on my phone, and an old test account Opabinia robotus originally intended for a bot that never materialized.

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